Competing with everyone from Evite.com to Facebook‘s Events Calendar, Paperlesshas raised $25 million in new venture funding to grow its Paperless Post digital and printed invitation app beyond the U.S., Lora Kolodny reports. August Capital led the round, joined by Paperless Post’s earlier backer RRE Ventures. According to James Hirschfeld, who runs the business with his sister and co-CEO, Alexa Hirschfeld, Paperless Post plans to acquire more users domestically and to expand to international, English-language markets. The 70-employee startup’s digital and printed invitations are free of advertising, and the company keeps all its users’ data private. It has no plans to sell any user data, even in aggregate, in the future, James Hirschfeld said.

ALSO IN TODAY’S VENTUREWIRE (subscription required):

Jasper has raised $50 million in funding at a valuation of more than $1 billion for software that enables objects of all types–autos, baby pajamas, airplane engines and so on–to communicate in what has lately become known as the Internet of Things. The funding was provided by Temasek and takes Jasper’s total funding to $205 million.

Storage-by-the-box service Boxbee Simple Urban Storage has raised $2.3 million in a seed round led by Floodgate Capital, with Google Ventures, 500 Startups, Techstars, Jason Calacanis and Ludlow Ventures taking part. Now operating in San Francisco and New York, the 13-employee startup has big plans for new geographies and new services, an investor told VentureWire.

FireHost raised another $25 million in funding for its secure cloud service as the company moves to focus on larger customers. The company’s COO tells VentureWire about its revenue trends and what the new money will go toward.

ItsOn, a mobile services provider, raised another $12.5 million in funding for software that helps mobile operators make more money from phones. The Series C round was led by Tenaya Capital and includes current investor Andreessen Horowitz.

Fitnet, a mobile fitness application, has raised a $1.4 million Series A round just a few months after going live in Apple’s App Store. While the app stores for mobile devices are filled with consumer-facing health and fitness apps, Fitnet is offering something most rival companies are not, VentureWire reports.

Cardiac Dimensions, which has been selling its heart-valve repair technology in Europe and aims to do the same in the U.S. one day, has raised an additional $20 million in funding led by M.H. Carnegie and Co. and return investor Lumira Capital led the round. We report on several other companies that offer mitral-valve repair products.

(VentureWire is a daily newsletter with comprehensive analysis of all the investments, deals and personnel moves involving start-ups and their venture backers. For a two-week trial, click here.)

ELSEWHERE AROUND THE WEB:

Twitter’s Gnip Deal Signals Bigger Role in Providing Data to Advertisers.Twitter agreed to acquire data partner Gnip, in a sign that the messaging service wants a bigger role in analyzing tweets for businesses hungry for insights from social media, the WSJ’s Elizabeth Dwoskin and Yoree Koh report. Gnip had raised less than $10 million from firms including Foundry Group, First Round Capital and SoftTech VC.

Hadoop Gaining Traction. The Hadoop open source storage system is emerging as a key part of the Big Data revolution, reports Clint Boulton of the WSJ’s CIO Journal. Last month, Hadoop providers Cloudera, Hortonworks and Platfora received a collective $1 billion from investors convinced that they are onto something big.

The Startup From Ipanema. With the FIFA World Cup just months away and the Olympic Games following in two years, the spotlight is shining on Brazil’s technology industry, and the country is bursting with both startups and opportunities, writes Brazil-based Atomico investor Carlos Pires in a guest column for re/code. A recent report by the Latin American Private Equity and Venture Capital Association revealed that private equity and venture capital investments in Brazil totaled U.S. $6.04 billion last year.

Maynard Webb on the Sharing Economy. The WSJ’s Accelerators blog takes up the topic of the sharing economy, in which new online services are making it possible for consumers and businesses to easily share talent, goods and services. Yahoo Chairman and former eBay COO Maynard Webb is a big fan of the sharing economy and thinks government restrictions on sharing startups like Airbnb, Lyft and Uber are “really unfair to consumers.”Meanwhile, TechStars founder and CEO David Cohen asks the question: Is the sharing economy just another buzzword, or is it actually an evolution of our economy and the way we live and work?

About Venture Capital Dispatch

Produced by the editors of Dow Jones VentureWire, Venture Capital Dispatch tracks the fast-moving developments at the intersection of high-tech innovation and venture capital finance. Featuring the VentureWire reporting team in the Silicon Valley, New York, Boston and Shanghai tech centers, Venture Capital Dispatch provides insight into the newest start-ups and latest trends in venture capital investing. Write us at VCdispatch@dowjones.com. For more information on Dow Jones products covering venture capital and other financial markets, go to http://pevc.dowjones.com.